Things are unraveling in the last installment of Pullman's latest trilogy, the second of the author's magisterial trilogies set in a universe that appears, now more than ever, as a charged and skewed version of our own. Institutions are weakening, or restructuring themselves along unfamiliar and disquieting lines. An hidden force "is destroying the air and the seasons"; concurrently, "money's going bad, and no one knows why". Control is shifting from governments, and gathering in the halls of religious leaders, the vaults of corporations, the hands of crowds. "An element is at work, silently, imperceptibly", says trader a trader character, keeping a watchful eye on the ancient paths from his post in an city cafe. "Elements we thought were firm and strong are weakening and giving way."
The Central Mystery and Lyra's Journey
Exactly what that force might be, and methods to fight it, is the inquiry that drives the concluding book, which resumes where its predecessor left off. This is, according to many, the author's concluding foray into the elaborately built, endlessly enchanting universe he first introduced in the distant past, with the launch of His Dark Materials. It's a realm whose terrain corresponds to that of our world, but whose past diverges and shifts with ours; where the individuals look and reason and act like us, but are accompanied by external spirits, souls in beast form; where the heavens are filled with sorceresses and gryphons, but below, buses are caught and beverages is sipped, and middle-aged professors carry fancy shopping bags. Lyra, whom we first introduced to as a young girl in the original trilogy, and then saw again as a baby in the first volume, the origin story with which the author began The Book of Dust, is now a young woman: still distinctly the spiky and determined protagonist of the prior volumes, but aged, melancholic, more cautious, more doubtful. This restraint is amplified by her division from her animal guide, her daemon – but it was also, ironically, the catalyst which made him desert her in the first place.
Merging Narratives
The daemon's resolve to leave in quest of that childlike part of her which she seems to have lost (an quality which he symbolizes as her "imagination"), and her journey to reunite with him, were the incitements of The Secret Commonwealth, which chronicled Lyra undertake a picaresque journey across Europe and into the Caucasus, encountering with amazement and risk on the way. But from the outset, underlying forces were in motion, and darker forces at work. The church authority – the church's ruling body, and the author's brilliantly sinister representation of strict, procedural evil – is under fresh command, and asserting its power. The antagonist – our protagonist's family member, who holds responsible her for his sibling's death – has positioned himself into the position of president of the authority's ruling assembly, and is set on using his fresh authority to extend the institution's dominium. A key character, who rescued infant the heroine to security along a swollen river as an child in the prequel, is now an Oxford don with a additional duty in espionage: he is assigned to the city to find out more about Delamare's plans. And beneath all of this is the puzzle surrounding the uncommon and precious essential oil which seems in some way to be the cause of a societal and financial upheaval emanating out from the region. The substance is viewed by certain groups as a marketable commodity, by others as a scientific or spiritual wonder, and by further factions – the zealous "mountain dwellers" – as a wellspring of evil; an insult that must be eradicated. The dilemma of its source, its significance, and if it should be removed or safeguarded is escalating in importance.
Similar to the first series, the heroine's actions, and her future, are shown to be deeply linked with the future of the world
In the previous volume, these narratives ran mostly in side by side. In this final book, they converge. As in His Dark Materials, the protagonist's actions and her destiny are shown to be inextricably woven with the fate of the universe. Her individual journey to reconnect with her daemon and rediscover her creativity becomes the primary struggle in a wider battle with an authoritarian regime which, as such regimes often attempt, is attempting to suppress independence of reason, innovation and art: all the personal, resistant ways in which humans can be liberated.
Atmospheric Fissures and Moral Battles
The story starts with the finding of a set of strange cracks in the makeup of the Earth's air: windows that appear to open into other worlds. A particular window seems to be the point of the fiercely disputed mystical extract. The church, with Delamare at its helm, classifies these openings as a problem to the religion's doctrine and sets out to destroy them. As the heroine begins to move from strict reason and revert to intuition, however, her conviction that these places must be defended – that their meaning and what they offer is mysteriously vital – increases. "Cosmic particles, or the extract, or the creativity, or the Rose Field, or no matter what we name it," she says, "we require it." The setting for a Blakean struggle between purity and experience is set.
Narrative Pacing and Personal Evolution
At a substantial length, The Rose Field|this volume|the
